Chutzpah! Festival reveals lineup for 23rd season featuring klezmer clarinet, artistic welding, and more
Unique performances range from closing night event The Best of Israeli Comedy to a blend of dance and Deaf theatre in When The Walls Come Down
FORGE. Photo by JMA Photography
THE 23RD ANNUAL Chutzpah! Festival is gearing up for this year’s run from November 2 to 23, with a just-announced lineup spanning the Canadian premiere of U.K. artist Rachel Mars’s live welding creation FORGE, and Canadian composer Rita Ueda’s latest chamber opera I Have My Mother’s Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations.
A new venue joins the festival’s roster of performance spaces this year: IE Creative Artworks on Granville Island. Events will also be held at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, Wosk Auditorium, and the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery (the fest’s hub at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver).
The festival kicks off on November 2 with an Opening Night Special Event, The Debaters Live - Chutzpah! Edition, at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre at 7 pm. In a take on the comedy debate format heard on Richard Side’s CBC Radio show, Canadian comics Jacob Samuel and Charlie Demers square off in laughter-inducing arguments moderated by Kate Davis.
The Best of Israeli Comedy, a Closing Night Special Event, wraps things up on November 23 at 8 pm at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre. Israeli standup comedians Benji Lovitt, Yossi Tarablus, Deborah Kaye, and Dana Perry Segal present an evening of diverse perspectives and side-splitting humour hosted by Vancouver’s Kyle Berger.
Throughout the rest of the festival, there’s a diverse collection of innovative shows. FORGE, a unique multimedia offering, invites audiences to don protective gear and watch queer Jewish U.K.-based artist Mars as she welds a replica of the stolen Dachau concentration camp gate, accompanied by a live soundscape.
In the dance genre, Vancouver’s All Bodies Dance Project showcases the world premiere of DWELL on November 19, an exploration from a Jewish perspective of belonging and displacement. There’s also When the Walls Come Down, a Dance//Novella performance inspired by Deaf artist Caroline Hébert’s life story that incorporates ASL and English subtitles; and a double bill featuring Meghann Michalsky and Katherine Semchuk’s Maybe We Land, alongside Juan Villegas’s collaboration with Vanessa Goodman, Edictum.
When the Walls Come Down. Photo by Four Eyes Portraits
Theatre-wise, there are two world premieres on the lineup. Pomarantz collective’s experimental work The Narrow Bridge incorporates digital multimedia by Chimerik, and shadow puppetry by Mind of a Snail, to depict the importance of The Dybbuk, a classic 1912 Yiddish play, in the Jewish theatre repertoire. Elsewhere, Israeli solo piece Whistle follows a woman trying to live a full, happy life amidst the pain she feels as an only child of Auschwitz survivors.
Three concerts will also take place: the U.S.’s klezmer clarinet act Michael Winograd and The Honorable Mentshn with special guest Josh “Socalled” Dolgin on November 4; Israeli Netherlands-based vocalist-musician Nani Noam Vazana, who performs in the endangered Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language, on November 11; and Sephardic Jewish-Syrian-Roma group Taraf Syriana on November 21.
The festival will present a film screening, too (Love Gets a Room on November 20), and a grassroots storytelling series called The Flame (Home Again at Chutzpah! on November 6). Plus, the community and family programming first introduced at last year’s festival will return this time around, which includes an all-ages Klezmer and Yiddish dance party, and an audience sing-along in a musical accompaniment for three Yiddish poems.
Full details on all the events being held this year can be found at the Chutzpah! Festival website, along with access to tickets (on sale now).
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